"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free...to a time when truth exists, and what is done cannot be undone...From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!" - George Orwell, 1984

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Cry Havoc and Let Slip The Dogs of Buggery

A while back I had a little extra cash and I rented the DVD of the latest Hollywood attempt at Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, with Jeremy Irons in the title role of Antonio and Al Pacino as Shylock, and Joseph Fiennes as Bassiano. I was kind of surprised they'd still perform the Bard's anti-Jewish classic at all; I thought it was headed for the Memory Hole long ago.

It's a mediocre job at best, and the acting was pretty damned lifeless, a really lousy performance compared to what one would normally expect of such a cast. Indeed, if I hadn't gotten a chance to look at Lynn Collins in period dress, I probably would have turned the damned thing off halfway.

Needless to say, the producer and director cut out most of Shylock's snarling anti-Christian lines, which was to be expected. But what was far worse, they just had to insert a little perversion into it, in the form of a slurpy homo lip-kiss between Irons and Fiennes which had nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the plot line, and which Shakespeare would never have countenanced. The implication, of course, was that Antonio was stretching his credit to the limit to lend Bassiano 3,000 ducats (in order to marry an heiress) because Antonio and Bassiano were bugger boys, which is a perversion of Shakespeare in every sense of the word and makes me want to vomit and strangle the nearest Jew.

And no, that asshole Bruce Alexander to the contrary, there is not one single jot or minute fragment of evidence that William Shakespeare was a homosexual. In fact, so little is known about Shakespeare that he might not even have been Shakespeare. A man of that name appears to have existed, but he may have been a pen name for someone else.

No, not Christopher Marlowe, either. There is some evidence that Christopher Marlowe made some sodomitic statements, but these appear to have been drunken tavern ravings, and Marlowe was known as one of these characters who would say or do anything to shock the stuffed-shirt establishment of his day, or should I say starched-ruff establishment? No evidence exists that Marlowe ever buggered a single little bum, and a lot less evidence than there is on Michael Jackson. (What appears to have gotten Marlowe whacked in Mrs. Bull's joint was his involvement in Walsingham's intelligence apparatus and Marlowe's apparent decision to run a little counterfeiting operation as a sideline, to general embarrassment all around.)

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

I find myself watching a lot of BBC classic movie productions lately.

Some of them can get tiresome but rarely does one see a nigger. The acting and stories are usually superb. I speak of the likes of The Forsyte Saga, and some of Dickens novels put to movies, (e.g., Bleak House).

At least whites are portrayed as competent and often noble, as well as neurotic. Except for Othello, if there are niggers they are cast as servants etc.

Othello was of course the Moor of Venice, not the Nigger of Venice. In the latest version of the play Othello is a pure swamp ape. Made me sick I couldn't watch all of it.

To your topic. I rented a PBS production about the life and times of Shakespeare. I got a lot of info about him I didn't know but overall, according to this PBS production, Shakespeare was a Jew loving, half queer, nigger loving rabble. A kind of early hippie.

One thing I came away with is that Shakespeare was very light on academics. He didn't seem to have had much contact in his youth with the study needed to write the weighty plays that he did.